Posts tagged ‘cobalt’

Tesla is currently stuck in “production hell” with Model 3 delays, as Elon Musk describes it.

But Winston Churchill had a great quote about facing what seems like insurmountable adversity: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” This is certainly a maxim that Musk and Tesla will need to live by in order to realize the company’s longstanding mission, which is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.

This giant infographic comes to us from Global Energy Metals TSXV:GEMC and it is the final part of our three-part Rise of Tesla series, which is a definitive source for everything you ever wanted to know about the company.

Part 3 shows Musk’s future vision and what it holds for the company once it can get past current production issues.

Tesla can accomplish this by making electric vehicles, batteries and energy solutions—and by finding ways to seamlessly integrate them.

2. Tesla’s strategy: “The competitive strength of Tesla long-term is not going to be the car, it’s going to be the factory.”

Tesla aims to productize the factory so that vehicle assembly can be automated at a revolutionary pace. In other words, Tesla wants to perfect the making of the “machine that builds the machine.” It wants to use these factories to pump out EVs at a pace never before seen. It aims to change the world.

The future of Tesla

If Musk has his way and everything goes according to plan, this is how the future of Tesla will unfold. Note: Keep in mind that Tesla sometimes overpromises and that the following is an extrapolation of Tesla’s vision and announced plans as of spring 2018.

A sustainable energy powerhouse

Tesla’s goal is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy—but simply making a few electric cars is not going to be enough to put a dent into this. That’s why the future of Tesla will be defined by bigger and bolder moves:

The Tesla Semi: Tesla has unveiled the Tesla Semi, which can go 0 to 60 mph with 80,000 pounds (36 tonnes) in just 20 seconds. Fully electric and with a 200-kWh battery pack, Musk says, it would be “economic suicide” for trucking companies to continue driving diesel trucks.

Mass transit: Musk said in his Master Plan, Part Deux blog post that he wants to design “high passenger-density urban transport.” It’s anticipated that this will come in the form of an autonomous minibus, built off the Model X concept.

A new energy paradigm: Tesla is not just building cars—it’s democratizing green energy by creating a self-dependent ecosystem of products. This way, homeowners can ensure their appliances and cars are running off of green energy, and even sell it back to the grid if they like.

As Tesla works on this sustainable future, the company isn’t afraid to show off its battery tech in the interim. The company even built the world’s largest lithium-ion battery farm (100 MW) in South Australia, to win a bet, in fewer than 100 days.

Other new models

Musk says that Tesla plans to “address all major segments” of the auto market.

Model Y: This will be a crossover vehicle built on the Model 3 platform, expected to go into production in 2019. It will round out the “S3XY” product line of Tesla’s first four post-Roadster vehicles.

Pickup truck: This will be Tesla’s priority after the Model Y and Musk says he is “dying to build it.” Musk says it’ll be the same size as a Ford F-150 or bigger to account for a “game-changing” feature he wants to add, but has not yet revealed.

Ultra low-cost model: Tesla has also announced that it will need a model cheaper than the Model 3 in the near future. This would allow Tesla to compete against a much wider segment of the auto market, and the future of Tesla hinges on its success.

Multiple Gigafactories

Tesla already has two: Gigafactory I in Reno, Nevada (batteries) and Gigafactory II in Buffalo, New York (solar panels).

The Gigafactory I started battery cell production in 2017. It will eventually produce enough batteries to power 500,000 cars per year. Meanwhile, the second factory is operated by Tesla’s SolarCity subsidiary, producing photovoltaic modules for solar panels and solar shingles for Tesla’s solar roof product.

Tesla said in 2017 that there will be “probably four” more battery Gigafactories in locations that would “address a global market,” including one in Europe. This makes sense, since the need for lithium-ion batteries to power these EVs is exploding. An important component of Tesla’s future will also be sourcing the raw materials needed for these Gigafactories, such as cobalt, lithium, graphite and nickel.

The Chinese market

The good news: Tesla already owns about 81% of the market for imported plug-in EVs in China.

The bad news: That’s only about 2.5% of the total Chinese EV market, when accounting for domestically made EVs.

China is the largest auto market in the world—and make no mistake about it, Tesla wants to own a large chunk of it. In 2017, China accounted for 24.7 million passenger vehicle sales, amounting to 31% of the global auto market.

Automation and the sharing economy

Finally, Tesla wants its vehicles to be fully autonomous and to have shared fleets that drive around to transport people.

Autonomous: Tesla aims to develop a self-driving capability that is 10 times safer than manual via massive fleet learning.

Shared: Most cars are used only by their owners and only for 5% of each day. With self-driving cars, a car can reach its true potential utility by being shared between multiple users.

Conclusion

The future of Tesla is ambitious and the company’s strategy is even considered naïve by some. But if Musk and Tesla are able to perfect building the “machine that builds the machine,” all bets will be off.

Supported by a successful financing and encouraging geophysical and drill results, Belmont Resources TSXV:BEA prepares to advance its Kibby Basin lithium project on two fronts. The company now plans to sink up to five holes on the 2,760-hectare Nevada property while continuing lithium extraction discussions with other companies that have requested samples.

The drill campaign would be Kibby Basin’s second, following two holes from last year. Core samples graded between 70 ppm and 200 ppm Li2O. Thirteen of 25 samples surpassed 100 ppm, “indicating that the sediments could be a potential source of lithium for the underlying aquifers,” the company stated.

Since then a magnetotelluric survey covered some 36 square kilometres, adding geophysical detail to a 2016 gravity survey and showing a conductive zone that starts about 500 metres in depth.

Backing the campaign will be fresh financing. The second tranche of private placements totalling $198,000 closed this month.

In New Brunswick last November, Belmont acquired the Mid-Corner/Johnson Croft property, where historic, non-43-101 sampling showed prospectivity for zinc, copper and cobalt. Along with International Montoro Resources TSXV:IMT, Belmont shares a 50/50 interest in two Saskatchewan uranium properties, Crackingstone and Orbit Lake.

The U.S. Critical Materials Institute develops new technologies for crucial commodities

by Greg Klein

A rare earths supply chain outside China? It exists in the United States and Alex King has proof on his desk in the form of neodymium-iron-boron magnets, an all-American achievement from mine to finished product. But the Critical Materials Institute director says it’s up to manufacturers to take this pilot project to an industry-wide scale. Meanwhile the CMI looks back on its first five years of successful research while preparing future projects to help supply the stuff of modern life.

Alex King: “There’s a lot of steps in rebuilding that supply chain. Our role as researchers is to demonstrate it can be done. We’ve done that.” (Photo: Colorado School of Mines)

The CMI’s genesis came in the wake of crisis. China’s 2010 ban on rare earths exports to Japan abruptly destroyed non-Chinese supply chains. As other countries began developing their own deposits, China changed tactics to flood the market with relatively cheap output.

Since then the country has held the rest of the world dependent, producing upwards of 90% of global production for these metals considered essential to energy, defence and the overall economy.

That scenario prompted U.S. Congress to create the CMI in 2013, as one of four Department of Energy innovation hubs. Involving four national laboratories, seven universities, about a dozen corporations and roughly 350 researchers, the interdisciplinary group gets US$25 million a year and “a considerable amount of freedom” to pursue its mandate, King says.

The CMI channels all that into four areas. One is to develop technologies that help make new mines viable. The second, “in direct conflict with the first,” is to find alternative materials. Efficient use of commodities comprises the third focus, through improvements in manufacturing, recycling and re-use.

“Those three areas are supported by a fourth, which is a kind of cross-cutting research focus extending across a wide range of areas including quantum physics, chemistry, environmental impact studies and, last but certainly not least, economics—what’s the economic impact of the work we do, what’s its potential, where are the economically most impactful areas for our researchers to address,” King relates.

With 30 to 35 individual projects underway at any time, CMI successes include the Nd-Fe-B batteries. They began with ore from Mountain Pass, the California mine whose 2015 shutdown set back Western rare earths aspirations.

Nevertheless “that ore was separated into individual rare earth oxides in a pilot scale facility in Idaho National Lab,” explains King. “The separated rare earth oxides were reduced to master alloys at a company called Infinium in the Boston area. The master alloys were brought to the Ames Lab here at Iowa State University and fabricated into magnets. So all the skills are here in the U.S. We know how to do it. I have the magnets on my desk as proof.”

But, he asks, “can we do that on an industrial scale? That depends on companies picking up and taking ownership of some of these processes.”

In part, that would require the manufacturers who use the magnets to leave Asia. “Whether it’s an electric motor, a hard disk drive, the speakers in your phone or whatever, all that’s done in Asia,” King points out. “And that means it is most advantageous to make the magnets in Asia.”

America does have existing potential domestic demand, however. The U.S. remains a world leader in manufacturing loudspeakers and is a significant builder of industrial motors. Those two sectors might welcome a reliable rare earths supply chain.

“There’s a lot of steps in rebuilding that supply chain. Our role as researchers is to demonstrate it can be done. We’ve done that.”

Among other accomplishments over its first five years, the CMI found alternatives to both europium and terbium in efficient lighting, developed a number of improvements in the viability of rare earths mining and created much more efficient RE separation.

“We also developed a new use for cerium, which is an over-produced rare earth that is a burden on mining,” King says. “We have an aluminum-cerium alloy that is now in production and has actually entered the commercial marketplace and is being sold. Generating use for cerium should generate additional cash flow for some of the traditional forms of rare earths mining.”

Getting back to magnets, “we also invented a way of making them that is much more efficient, greatly reduces sensitive materials like neodymium and dysprosium, and makes electric devices like motors and generators much more efficient.”

All these materials have multiple uses. It’s not like they don’t have interest in the Pentagon and other places.—Alex King

Future projects will focus less on rare earths but more on lithium. The CMI will also tackle several others from the draft list of 35 critical minerals the U.S. released in February: cobalt, manganese, gallium, indium, tellurium, platinum group metals, vanadium and graphite. “These are the ones where we feel we can make the most impact.”

While the emphasis remains on energy minerals, “all these materials have multiple uses. It’s not like they don’t have interest in the Pentagon and other places.”

But the list is hardly permanent, while the challenges will continue. “We’ve learned a huge amount over the last five years about how the market responds when a material becomes critical,” he recalls. “And that knowledge is incredibly valuable because we anticipate there will be increasing incidences of materials going critical. Technology’s moving so fast and demand is shifting so fast that supply will have a hard time keeping up. That will cause short-term supply shortfalls or even excesses. What we need to do is capture the wisdom that has been won in the rare earths crisis and recovery, and be ready to apply that as other materials go critical in the future.”

Alex King speaks at Argus Specialty Metals Week, held in Henderson, Nevada, from April 16 to 18. For a 15% discount on registration, enter code RARE2018.

High grades continue as Canada Cobalt Works TSXV:CCW conducts underground bulk sampling at the past-producing Castle mine in eastern Ontario. A pulp assay on a 35-kilogram sample released March 16 showed 2.46% cobalt, 1% nickel and 6,173 g/t or 198.5 ounces per tonne silver.

Visible cobalt mineralization can be seen in the former Castle mine’s first level.

A metallic screen fire assay on a 66-gram native silver sample not included in the previous assay brought “a head grade of 818,254 g/t (26,307 ounces per tonne),” Canada Cobalt stated. The samples were selective and not representative, the company emphasized.

Samples came from the historic mine’s first level, where rehab engineers have observed cobalt mineralization in the stopes, Canada Cobalt added. In operation off and on between 1917 and 1989, Castle’s underground workings extend through 11 levels totalling about 18 kilometres.

Canada Cobalt appointed Ron Molnar as an adviser on the company’s proprietary Re-2OX process for extracting cobalt and lithium from used Li-ion batteries. “Molnar has designed, built and operated over 60 pilot plant circuits extracting, separating and purifying a wide range of metallic elements from cobalt to rare earths,” the company stated.

Canada Cobalt also plans to build a 600-tpd gold processing facility to be financed by Granada Gold Mine TSXV:GGM, which holds a project near Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec. The two companies share overlapping management and directors.

Recently received geophysical results will help Belmont Resources TSXV:BEA select drill targets for its Kibby Basin lithium property in Nevada. Described as a “full tensor magnetotelluric technology that acquires resistivity data in the 10 kHz to 0.001 Hz frequency band,” the survey covered about 36 square kilometres to depths of three kilometres over a playa basin and some adjoining turf.

While a 2016 gravity survey suggested the presence of a basin about 4,000 metres deep, the new results “clearly map a more conductive zone beginning at approximately 500 metres’ depth,” Belmont stated. Targets for a 2018 drill program on the 2,760-hectare property are being considered where potential brine contacts are closest to the playa surface, the company added.

Last year saw “few eye-popping deals and only limited financing activity” as TSX-listed mining companies responded cautiously to improved markets, according to a new PricewaterhouseCoopers report. Like many of their peers internationally, the big board’s top 25 miners focused on “paying down debt, improving balance sheets and judiciously investing in capital projects as commodity prices largely stabilized.”

Gold, the raison d’être for most of the miners, fell 3% during the year ending September 30. During that period the 225 TSX-listed miners (down from 230 the previous year) lost 4% of their aggregate value, compared with a 10% combined improvement for other sectors. Miners slipped to a 9% share of the entire TSX market, compared with 11% the previous year, holding ninth place among industries on the exchange. (Financial services came in first.)

Barrick Gold TSX:ABX, still the world’s top gold producer despite Newmont Mining’s (NYSE:NEM) challenge, held top place among TSX mining market caps as of September 30. The top stock was Kirkland Lake Gold TSX:KL, with a 175% price increase over the full year, following its billion-dollar takeout of Newmarket Gold. The acquisition represented part of a trend of “mid-market, intermediate gold companies looking to build scale and gain efficiencies through consolidation,” said John Matheson of PwC Canada.

Two since-merged companies, Potash Corp of Saskatchewan and Agrium, followed Barrick with second and third place among TSX mining valuations. Currently at about $41 billion, the potash combination Nutrien Ltd TSX:NTR has far surpassed Barrick’s $16.8-billion market cap.

Nearly half of the 225 companies had valuations of $150 million or less. But the category between $150 million and $1 billion boasted 74 companies, compared with 59 the previous year.

Nineteen of the top 25 had exposure to gold, 10 to copper, seven to zinc, six to silver and four to nickel, PwC stated. The report noted increasingly bullish sentiment for copper, zinc, cobalt and lithium. The latter mineral did especially well for five companies, with an approximately 39% total increase in valuations over nine months to September 30 for Orocobre TSX:ORL, Lithium Americas TSX:LAC, Nemaska Lithium TSX:NMX, Avalon Advanced Materials TSX:AVL and Globex Mining Enterprises TSX:GMX.

But overall, TSX miners “raised only half the equity capital in 2017 that they did the previous year. And for the second consecutive year, there were no mining initial public offerings on the TSX.”

Eastern Ontario’s former Castle mine gave up more high-grade assays as Canada Cobalt Works TSXV:CCW takes initial permitting steps for dewatering the underground workings and building a processing facility for another project. A 13-kilogram sample showed 2.47% cobalt, 23.4 g/t silver, 0.68% nickel and 1.83 g/t gold. A 14-kilo sample brought 0.91% cobalt, 460 g/t silver and anomalous nickel and gold. The company, formerly Castle Silver Resources, warned that the samples are selective and not necessarily representative.

Two mini-bulk samples released in early December graded 3.124% and 1.036% cobalt, along with silver and nickel. Assays are pending from last summer’s 2,405-metre surface drill campaign, from where a single intercept released so far graded 1.55% cobalt, along with nickel, gold and silver over 0.65 metres.

The company’s now preparing to apply for government permission to dewater levels two to 11 of the former mine, which operated intermittently between 1917 and 1989.

With plans to build a 600-tpd gravity flotation cyanidation mill, Canada Cobalt has retained an engineering firm to begin earthworks studies for permitting. The plant would be financed by Granada Gold Mine TSXV:GGM to process material from its project near Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, about 200 road kilometres away. Granada’s gold project reached pre-feasibility in 2014 and a resource update in June.

Now being mobilized, an electromagnetic survey will help target brine aquifers on Belmont Resources’ (TSXV:BEA) Kibby Basin property. The company describes Quantec Geoscience’s Spartan AMT/MT method as “a full tensor magnetotelluric technology that acquires resistivity data in the 10 kHz to 0.001 Hz frequency band. The result is a measurement that is applicable from near-surface to potential depths of three kilometres or more.” Belmont credits Quantec with over 5,000 geophysical programs in over 50 countries.

Two holes sunk on Kibby Basin last year brought core samples between 70 ppm and 200 ppm lithium.

The Kibby Basin survey should take nine days, with another two weeks for an initial report.

The program follows a satellite data review and two-hole 2017 drill campaign on the 2,760-hectare Nevada property 65 kilometres north of Clayton Valley. Thirteen of 25 core samples surpassed 100 ppm lithium, “indicating that the sediments could be a potential source of lithium for the underlying aquifers,” the company stated.

A gravity survey the previous year suggested the property hosts a closed basin which the company later estimated to cover four square kilometres, extending to at least 1.5 kilometres in depth.

Last week Belmont announced its lawyers would request the annulment of a decision by the International Centre For Settlement Of Investment Disputes reported in August. The tribunal stated it had no jurisdiction in a dispute involving Belmont, EuroGas Inc and the Slovak Republic regarding Rozmin SRO’s ownership of the Gemerska Poloma talc deposit. Belmont seeks to be restored as a claimant in the arbitration proceedings.

The company also holds the Mid Corner-Johnson Croft property in New Brunswick, a prospect with some historic, non-43-101 zinc-copper-cobalt sampling results that has yet to undergo modern geophysics.

In northern Saskatchewan, Belmont and International Montoro Resources TSXV:IMT share a 50/50 stake in the Crackingstone and Orbit Lake uranium properties.

Belmont closed an oversubscribed private placement of $312,200 in December.

Lynx Lake has the Trans-Labrador Highway bisecting the property, as well as adjacent power lines.

Hole LL-17-01 brought 0.058% nickel and 0.013% cobalt over 115.2 metres. LL-17-02 returned 0.057% nickel and 0.014% cobalt over 110.8 metres (not true widths). The thickness of the intervals and distance between the holes suggest “potential for a more localized zone of economic mineralization in the area,” the company stated. Assays for gold, platinum and palladium are expected later this month.

The initial drill campaign tested a small part of an approximately 24,200-hectare property. Under focus was the project’s West Pit, where airborne VTEM found a shallow anomaly of high resistivity measuring about 400 metres in diameter and 50 to 300 metres in depth. Historic, non-43-101 grab sample assays from the area graded up to 1.03% copper, 0.566% cobalt, 0.1% nickel, 5 g/t silver, 0.36% chromium, 0.39% molybdenum and 0.23% vanadium.

Other historic, non-43-101 grab samples from the property’s east side showed up to 1.39% copper, 0.94% cobalt, 0.21% nickel and 6.5 g/t silver.

King’s Bay now plans geostatistical and structural analysis to identify more drill targets. A field crew returns later this year.

Meanwhile a 6% copper grade highlighted last month’s results from the company’s Trump Island project in northern Newfoundland. Four of 15 outcrop samples surpassed 1% copper and also showed cobalt assays up to 0.12%.

In September King’s Bay offered a $250,000 private placement that followed financings totalling $402,000 that closed the previous month.

The autumn campaign found significant mineralization despite inaccurate historic info. “It was not until hole KTP17-03 was collared that it became clear the historic holes were plotted approximately 50 metres away from their proper locations,” Kapuskasing noted. “Given this new information, the best grades noted historically were not duplicated during this drill program.”

Based on 1960s work, Sterling hosts an historic, non-43-101 estimate of about one million tonnes averaging 1% copper, reportedly open in all directions. Historic, non-43-101 drill results for Twin Pond have reached up to 4.2% copper over 3.35 metres, starting at 82.3 metres. Grab samples released last October graded up to 9.03% copper for Twin Pond, 7.19% copper for Sterling and 1.54% copper with cobalt and silver for the Lady Pond prospect.

Phase I left several priority targets untested on all three prospects. Now being planned is Phase II to attack the priorities and better identify the 2,450-hectare property’s high-grade zones at depth and along strike, the company added.

With logging road and ATV access, the project sits adjacent to the town of Springdale, near Newfoundland’s north coast. Rambler Mining and Metals TSXV:RAB holds a base metals mill 94 road kilometres away. Rambler also holds two historic, non-43-101 copper resources contiguously west of Lady Pond.